After getting stuck on the “Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol” book project, I tried to imagine another way to put a lot of the background material I had found on the Civil Air Patrol in context. I was particularly interested in the way the draft worked in the 1950s and 1960s to keep the armed forces amazingly young. I also became quite curious about how the idea of this young man’s army had come about since from my knowledge of early American history, I knew the militia tradition of America defined men of fighting age as 18-45, not teenagers. How did we go from the older tradition to this radically new tradition? My exploration of this idea led me explore the thinking of the American military progressives like Leonard Wood in their quest for universal military service, Prussian thinkers like Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, and earlier French military thinker both before and after the French Revolution. When I left off this project (because naturally other things came up), my notes were organized into these chapters:
Chapter 1 “Les jeunes gens iront au combat”
Chapter 2 Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz and Die Junge Feldarmee
Chapter 3 Nineteenth-Century Challenges to the American Militia/Volunteer Tradition
Chapter 4 “I would out-German the Germans”
Chapter 5 Sending Boys to Fight a Man’s War
Chapter 6 The Awkward Age
Chapter 7 Universal Military Training & Service
Chapter 8 Building Air Power “the American Way”
Chapter 9 Teenage Warrior